2020 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship Winner Announced

16.12.20

On behalf of the Blake-Beckett Trust, the Australian Society of Authors is thrilled to announce the shortlist and winner of the 2020 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship.

The Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship is offered annually to an Australian author to provide them with valuable time to work on a current manuscript. The Scholarship is worth $20,000 and is offered by the Blake-Beckett Trust thanks to the generosity of one of our long-term members and supporters, Wendy Beckett.

This year's applications were assessed by Toni Jordan and Helen O'Neill, who selected the three shortlisted applicants:

Aoife Clifford
Eleanor Limprecht
Mark Smith

We would like to introduce Wendy Beckett of the Blake-Beckett Trust to announce the winner of the 2020 Scholarship.

The judges were impressed by the exceptionally high standard of entries and felt that each of three shortlisted authors would have been a worthy winner.

Aoife Clifford’s entry, When We Fall, is a crime story about the fundamental nature of truth that demonstrates an arresting premise and tempting prose. 

Three Boys Gone, Mark Smith’s literary thriller, takes on the aftermath of a shocking tragedy with lyrical directness and an audacious approach to structure. 

The winning entry from Eleanor Limprecht, The Coast is an intrepid example of historical fiction with a chilling premise, a dynamic approach and themes (ranging from society’s terror of sickness to the power of individual resilience) that resonate to this day.  

Congratulations to Eleanor Limprecht, recipient of the 2020 Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship!

Toni Jordan is the author of five novels. Her debut, the international best-seller Addition was longlisted for the Miles Franklin award and won the Indie Award for best first book. Fall Girl was published internationally and Nine Days was awarded Best Fiction at the 2012 Indie Awards and was named in Kirkus Review’s Top 10 Historical Novels of 2013. Our Tiny, Useless Hearts (2016) was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for the Voss Literary Award. Toni has been published widely in newspapers and magazines. She holds a bachelor of science in physiology and a PhD in creative arts. Her most recent novel is The Fragments (2018). Toni lives in Melbourne.

Helen O’Neill is a multi-award-winning author and journalist who work has been published across the world. Helen worked as a staff journalist on The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian and Vogue Australia, and has a distinguished, two-decade career as a freelancer in print and TV (one documentary she worked on screened in over 200 countries on the same day). She is the author of five non-fiction books including the internationally published Florence Broadhurst – Her Secret and Extraordinary Lives and Daffodil, Biography of a Flower. Helen has judged on panels as diverse as The Walkley Foundation’s Arts Journalism prize, the World Food Media Awards, Copyright Agency’s Reading Australia Fellowship and the international Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence. She is Deputy Chair of the Board of the Australian Society of Authors, and from 2014 to 2020 served on the Board of Copyright Agency.

Find out more about the Blake-Beckett Trust Scholarship here.